There was another service offered by the BBC a few years after Teletext that also used some of the unused TV rows - Datacast. I found a disk last night containing a dump of a few hundred datacast rows grabbed by the Acorn Teletext adapter, and some prototype datacast software I wrote myself. If I remember right, at the start of Datacast there was a big kerfuffle over the inability to broadcast encrypted data (due to the laws at the time) and everything was in the clear, but I think they managed to fix that before they went live with a commercial service. It lasted about 10 years before it was knobbled by the faction within the BBC that didnât want BBC to do anything commercial.
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Great find!
The slow progress of teletext in the UK has given cause for concern to broadcasters, but Colin Mcintyre, Ceefax editor, points out that there are now 32000 sets in use, and that the number is increasing at the rate of about 3000 per month. The rate has improved since 22in teletext sets became available. BBC Ceefax now employs twenty journalists and puts out around 400 pages on the two channels.
(had this reply languishing as a draft, for over a year, just rediscovered itâŠ)
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I found in Acorn User June 1986 that Datacast was obviously introduced in 1986.
Here in Germany and elsewhere we had much later Teletext.
But in 1986 we had Videodat within the show âWDR Computerclubâ airing software in those rows. And in the early 80s (1983 ?) as loud audio noises via TV called Hard-Bit-Rock
starting at2â23